And here we are again!

This (and some of the other stories I have planned too) takes place in a 2015 AU. Just to make the technology line up.

Day 7: Symbols

Aelita hadn't foreseen this part of the operation being nearly this hard.

She'd already spent months on the album itself. She'd hoarded hundreds of samples, switched the same two chords in the fifth song around at least a dozen times, and tested the tracks on her friends again and again. But after all this time it was ready. She could think of a dozen things she could still do different, but she knew if she ever occupied herself with them she'd never come to a decision, and the album would never drop.

But before she could shake the electronic music world, she'd need an album cover. And for a cover, she'd need a look.

She'd opened up Photoshop thinking it'd be easy, but she'd only ended up staring at a blank square of creative space for over half an hour, rocking back and forth on her chair and tapping her finger against her chin. She had nothing to go on already established, nothing that was really her own. Her clothes and her hair had all been picked over and done for her at the Subdigitals concert; she wasn't so much herself as an accessory of the other band.

She'd been excited about it at the time, but she'd learned the hard way that she'd need something else. The only song on her Soundcloud, a single of the song she'd played at the Subdigitals, had a picture of herself in that getup as the cover. She'd put that out a month ago, to gauge the response she'd get. So far she'd gotten 62 plays, a few comments from some people that had been at the show, and many, many unsolicited invitations to listen to other members' music.

To stand out, she'd have to take some part of herself and fit it inside a square.

She filled the square in pink, and stared at it again. She spelled out her name in all caps, in multiple clean and crisp fonts. She switched between two before settling on one she still wasn't quite happy with. It was a good start, but…she needed something else. Something to start with.

Something like…a symbol. Every other artist she'd come across online had had /some/ kind of a symbol. Something to give their music dimension and meaning. She'd been told she had something of a mellow, airy sound, which had only gotten mellower and airier as she'd experimented with it, less suited for a teen concert hall and more geared toward a quiet study session. And yet there was a power behind it, a power no one had mentioned, but that she knew was there, because she knew it was inside herself…

But there was hardly any symbol for that.

And certainly not one that was exclusively hers. But she could still think of a dozen off the top of her head…and one in particular stood out.

She found herself scrambling for a pencil and paper pad, and slowly sketching the image in her mind. Concentric circles. One line on top, three lines on the bottom. It came so easily to her, she hardly had to think about drawing it. She could claim it as her own, and no one would be any the wiser. It certainly had deep personal meaning. As deep as the thoughts and effort she put into everything else…

But even if it wouldn't get them into trouble in the future, it wasn't hers. She didn't know where the symbol had come from in the first place, but it wasn't even something she could define herself as.

She tore the top sheet of the paper pad, crumpled it, and put it away on the desk. Then she looked back down, tapping the pencil against the top of the next sheet. Perhaps something that incorporated the letters of her name, she thought. She'd liked the lines she saw in the font she picked. Perhaps she could make them work together, and go with that until she could come up with something even more beautiful to add.

- Carth